


The Bookshelf

by thesignsofserbia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221B Baker Street, Attempt at Humor, Domestic Fluff, It's a bit silly, Lists, Post-Reichenbach, Sherlock Being Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 21:09:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3910777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesignsofserbia/pseuds/thesignsofserbia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John attempts to clear out the flat after Reichenbach and makes a list of the contents of the bookshelf</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bookshelf

**Author's Note:**

> Seriously, it's just a list. I woke up at 3am and my brain decided I had to write it down, I don't even know what is going on.

When John had been preparing to move out of 221B after Sherlock’s suicide, he’d tried to sort through the vast amount of stuff they (mostly Sherlock) had accumulated. It was an impossible task to remember what was whose, extract his things from the mess and box up the rest in some semblance of order.

Needless to say he’s given up pretty quickly, it was too soon and the memories too strong, not to mention that it would have taken him weeks. But he had managed to do a partial inventory of the bookshelf, and what he found had made him laugh through his tears, so he’d made a list of its contents because they were so quintessentially Sherlock and he never wanted to forget what it was really like living with the world’s only consulting detective.

  
He never ended up removing the large label taped across the top of the tea caddy that just read: NO.

 

The list had markings to sort the items into 3 groups; actual books, sort-of-books, and really-not-books.  
It read as follows:

 

 

1\. Half a dozen of John’s medical text’s that Sherlock had assimilated into his own anatomy books until John no longer knew which ones were his

 

2\. ‘An Apiarist’s Practical Guide’, ‘The Rooftop Beekeeper’s Handbook’, ‘Pollination and Hive Maintenance’

 

3\. Stacks of science journals on the floor in front of it a foot high

 

4\. Several French novels on indecipherable topics

 

5\. Various bad detective stories (John’s)

 

6\. A frightening amount of non-fiction crime works

 

7\. Books about geology, with highlighted passages about iron ore mining, clay deposits, erosion and soil.

 

8\. Chemistry textbooks so advanced they made John’s eyes cross

 

9\. ‘My First Solar System,’ which had been a sarcastic Christmas present from John

 

10\. A journal filled entirely with labelled smudges of lipstick

 

11\. A Botany book and three specialist books about poisons

 

12\. An ancient perfume catalogue with one product violently circled in permanent marker

 

13\. A very old and important looking leather bound one about law that was almost certainly pilfered

 

14\. A lock picking instruction booklet

 

15\. Thesauruses in 8 different languages (the newest one in Farsi)

 

16\. A heavily annotated copy of Ronald Regan’s first autobiography

 

17\. A tin hidden behind the heavier textbooks containing 11 of Lestrade’s identification badges spanning 7 years.

 

18\. 3 clay mice balanced on top of a book about curling

 

19\. The Quran and The Bible

 

20\. An alarmingly thick dissertation about senses, sensory deprivation, overstimulation and synaesthesia

 

21\. Several books about classical composers

 

22\. About a medium sized tree worth of music manuscript full of scrawled compositions

 

23\. A paperback about trains

 

24\. What may have been a plasticised cross-section of an equine spinal cord hastily stuffed into a dressage magazine (John didn’t really have a good look at that one)?

 

25\. 24 completely untouched copies of Macbeth, each with a different cover

 

26\. A bunch of very technical computing manuals

 

27\. A well-thumbed ‘Introduction to Cryptology’

 

28\. A CD containing information on forensic blood splatter and a single email to Sherlock from Harry, the existence of which sent John’s eyebrows flying into his hairline, but all it said was ‘who the fuck are you?’ And was probably there by accident.

 

29\. ‘The Dynamic Theory of Tides’

 

30\. A lonely-planet travel book for Swansea

 

31\. An angry letter from Mycroft in Spanish dated a decade ago

 

32\. A fish identification publication for the southern hemisphere with several pages bookmarked and illegible scrawl next to an image of a dusky whaler shark

 

33\. A file full of fliers so ignorant and bigoted that they were hilarious

 

34\. A list of aviation malfunctions in 2008-2011

 

35\. 4 fake ID’s for a young James Sigurdsson (With Sherlock’s photograph)

 

36\. Lots of hastily written case notes or experiment observations in a bizarre sort of Shorthand which was part equations, part French and part scribble.

 

37\. A carefully tended and dusted photo album that was full to bursting with alphabetised hate mail

 

38\. A quilting book (Mrs Hudson’s) forced to the back, and for good reason, it had had something serious spilt on it making it physically impossible to so much as pry it open.

 

39\. 6 loose pages of a Lemony Snicket comedy covered in equations in black ink

 

40\. A completely pulverised cuttlefish skeleton spread across the right side of the bottom shelf

 

41\. Two Agatha Christie novels which turned out to be stapled together and hollowed out to conceal a small jar of formaldehyde preserving a woman’s ear which was more than A-Bit-Not-Good and chances were; illegal.

 

42\. A scathing report about Chinese foot binding that had buckled under the pressure of the 182 elastic bands cutting into it

 

43\. 2 laminated newspaper articles about Somali pirates

 

44\. A label from every type of soft drink bottle imaginable each pressed behind a page of les miserables in order from most to least sugar content

 

45\. A Physics lab manual with the name Victor Trevor on the inside cover in beautiful handwriting

 

46\. A book about mixed martial arts

 

47\. An inexplicable plane ticket stub for a flight to Karachi in an unfamiliar name. It was dated just before Henry Knight’s case

 

48\. ‘The White Pages of Cloud Sub-types’

 

49\. An absolutely breathtaking half-finished sketch of Sherlock’s profile, where he was actually smiling, labelled ‘Will 1998 VT’

 

50\. A desert survival guide

 

51\. A shoelace with variously coloured stains, identical in shape, left over from an experiment John assumed

 

52\. A suspicious looking microchip taped to a giraffe bookmark

 

53\. War and Peace, but every 16th page had been folded using origami

 

54\. A book about the Migration patterns of the European swallow

 

55\. A finance text with what appeared to be the entire score from the movie ‘The Great Escape’ doodled in the margins. John didn’t know Sherlock had even seen the film; he’d probably deleted it, after memorising the soundtrack apparently.

 

56\. ‘Latin: The Origins of Modern English and How We Went Wrong’

 

57\. Hand written predictions of Sherlock’s and Mrs Hudson’s about how long each of John’s girlfriend would last, which peeved John a bit, but he had to admit it was hilarious. Mrs Hudson had been pretty accurate and Sherlock’s had almost always been too short (possibly optimistically).

 

58\. ‘Stuart; A Life backwards’ that had clearly been read more than once, but only the middle third of it

 

59\. A DVD Documentary about Albert Namatjira

 

60\. A worn user’s manual for a 2007 Honda CBR1000RR Motorcycle

 

61\. ‘Bridge Book - Aces Made Easy’

 

62\. An article about the true nature of the voodoo religion

 

63\. A book recounting all the known instances of cannibalism since 1914

 

64\. Far too many stolen police reports to be accidental

 

65\. A plastic frog superglued to a toy pink Cadillac displayed proudly on the top shelf

 

66\. A breakdown of the exact events and results of the Chernobyl disaster

 

67\. John’s birth certificate (the original)

 

68\. Hefty looking book about Leonardo Da Vinci’s experiments

 

69\. Several credit cards (two of them in Mycroft’s name) with a residual dusty of a dubious white powder

 

70\. 12 matches and 7 individual cigarette papers

 

71\. A report that Sherlock himself had published about everything to do with coffee, it’s chemical components, the different types of beans, how they are grown, flavours, ways to serve it; everything. It was 800 pages long.

 

72\. A slightly singed and very dated detention slip from a posh boarding school complaining of a serious lab accident, it was framed.

 

73\. A birthday card that John had given Sherlock at random in the second year they’d been living together because he refused to tell him the actual date

 

74\. Every copy of John’s work timetable he’d ever posted on the fridge screwed up into a ball

 

75\. A professional photograph of the Holmes Brothers, depicting a sulky child, thin as a rake and with untameable curls that was instantly recognisable as Sherlock and an uncomfortable looking teenager who was a bit round. The back said; ‘Will aged 7, Myc aged 14’. Some of the references to Sherlock as ‘Will’ confused the hell out of John.

 

76\. And finally, there was a very long poem about Turkish Tea.

 

 


End file.
